response- Fit to be Citizens? Natalia Mollina

"The subject of healthfulness is the most important one in the world." (pg 71) This quote appeared early on in the assigned reading and stuck with me throughout my read. I never thought about how important it is to be healthy and how scary it can be to be sick. Back when their was less cures for disease and less money to research or pay for ailments, becoming sick was a much bigger deal.

The fact that disease and race were tied together in this book was very fascinating to me. Those are two things that I personally would never compare or chart next to each other. On top of disease being an actual serious matter, it was also used in a negative way to help almost classify the japanese as even worse than they were already looked at, for example calling Chinatown a "dirty, disease-filled, and immoral space"(page 72). There in the quote, the claim of the Japanese being diseased is said, but they even went as far as to call them immoral-which is where I had a thought, what if sickness and disease is being used as a scapegoat or an excuse as to why whites disliked the Japanese? After further reading I found many more quotes where the Japanese are looked at as "rotten" and "tainting the white residents" and "filth and stench" further helping me to believe that my thought deem true.

It's interesting to me how easy it is to turn against people when that is the norm. This story reminded me of some research I did in middle school on the Harlem Witch Trials and how any one who was said to be a witch was this ghastly evil being that you would never want to look at let alone speak to. In this case I felt like the Japanese were just poor old witches that no matter what they said to the courts or people, they were already witches and no one would believe them otherwise. Even though they did nothing wrong, the non-witches (white people) overpower what the Japanese claim to be by their current opinion and unfortunately, nothing could change that.

Response

There are three words in our English class that have been tied into everything we have read studied and discussed so far; paradigm, equality and change.

Throughout most of the Socratic Seminar we were discussing Harrison Bergeron and using that story as an example, but I couldn’t help to think of and compare everything I heard back to The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. We discussed how in Once Upon a Time there was a theme or an idea of “taking away beauty” because the mother and father ruined their home with brick walls and traps. I quickly thought back to Write in his story and how the color of his skin had taken away his beauty in the eyes of white men. If Write was a white man with the exact same personality, I’m sure he would have been doing just fine in life. Back then; the idea of “black skin being bad” was a racist paradigm that white people agreed on.

The seminar helped me to think of a couple of things; I realized that I don’t truly know what equality means, and I don’t know if equality is ever possible (and if it would be a good thing if it was). I also decided that change, or breaking the paradigm, is a very difficult thing to achieve, and being the first one to change is even harder. Each story I have read and discussed so far has helped me to see more and more connections and gain deeper understandings on these three words.